"Similarly, China's "progress" in building high-speed rail lines looked like an example to the world until a deadly crash"
Don't really want to get into a Good US - Bad China debate, but I wanted to point out bad use of stats you engaged in with this statement. It struck me because I am currently in Houston dealing with bad use of stats in the energy industry. Which flawed stats are being used as an argument against certain forms of energy.
Anyway... China's bullet trains have carried millions of passengers. As have HSR all around the globe. In that time, there was one crash in China, killing 40 people. The first, [as you were] the SECOND deadliest, HSR collision incident globally since Eschede-1998. That's actually a pretty good track record.
Again, I can tell you are pretty emotional about the China thing so I am not commenting on that... just saying that the HSR is actually pretty impressive when viewed from a dispassionate frame of reference.
I don't think the issue is statistics per se - the question is how much care has been taken in these infrastructure constructions.
It's not hard to lay tens of thousands of miles of shoddy track and run screaming locomotives down them. It's another game altogether to painstakingly design this system to be fault-tolerant and accept a wide range of failure modes.
The issue isn't that 35 people were killed out of millions transported, it's that the system seemingly had no account for a failure mode as simple as "train ahead loses power".
Getting something 95% safe is pretty cheap. Getting something 99.99% safe is monumentally expensive, and that really characterizes infrastructure development between the developed and developing world.
To circle back to the original point: OP is saying that China's HSR infrastructure was seen as an example to the world, creating controversy about the efficiency and cost of infrastructure in the developed world. That is, until you account for the fact that this infrastructure simply isn't built to the same standard as it is in the developed world.
Don't really want to get into a Good US - Bad China debate, but I wanted to point out bad use of stats you engaged in with this statement. It struck me because I am currently in Houston dealing with bad use of stats in the energy industry. Which flawed stats are being used as an argument against certain forms of energy.
Anyway... China's bullet trains have carried millions of passengers. As have HSR all around the globe. In that time, there was one crash in China, killing 40 people. The first, [as you were] the SECOND deadliest, HSR collision incident globally since Eschede-1998. That's actually a pretty good track record.
Again, I can tell you are pretty emotional about the China thing so I am not commenting on that... just saying that the HSR is actually pretty impressive when viewed from a dispassionate frame of reference.